$2nd Street was synonymous with sin in the 1970s.
Fucking Rudy Guiliani closed the porno shops and XXX theaters.
Disney moved into the vacated premises.
Now 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues belongs to fat people eating fast food.
A hell of gross consumption.
The Minnesota Strip was no heaven, but I liked it fine.
1976.
Nothing like it in the modern age.
Hot pants.
At the beginning of 1986 Candia left for a photo shoot in the Alps.
Several days later She phoned to say her boss had invited the fashion team for a ski trip to Isola 2000. Having heard her opinion that skiers were too poor to vacation in the tropics, I bit my tongue and drank heavier than normal that weekend. Candia called on Sunday to say they were stranded by a snowstorm. After she hung up, I convinced myself this was a fling and everything would be like it was before, otherwise she would have never bothered with the call.
On the day of her return I cleaned the apartment, bought flowers, chilled a bottle of champagne, and sprayed a perfume on the bed for an evening of coaxing her into my arms.
Candia arrived late. A new silver fur coat adorned cinnamon skin untouched by the alpine sun and my heart crumpled like a cheap beer can. The telephone rang and she snatched the receiver out of my hand. After several whispers Candia announced, "I have to meet the Italian client at the Hotel Crillion for dinner."
"Go ahead." The look in her eyes said nothing I could say would change her plans.
She left without mentioning what time to expect her home. For certain it wouldn't be early.
I had dinner at La Coupole and took a taxi to the club. It was an off night and I ordered a whiskey-coke. By 3AM I drank myself partially deaf and dumb.
"What's wrong?" Bernard stopped my dancing on a stool to Arthur Lee's HEY JOE.
"Nothing another whiskey-coke wouldn't cure." I shouted for a refill and Bernard annulled my order. "Go home and sleep this off?"
"A house is not a home." I staggered to the entrance and a runway model from Baltimore waylaid my departure. "Care to join me for a nightcap."
"Where?" I had champagne waiting in a bucket of melted ice.
"Where is unimportant." And she whispered an obscene proposal. Her idea of a nightcap differed from mine. "So?"
My girlfriend was probably making love to another man, however I held the high moral ground. "Another night."
"Another night?" The beautiful redhead graced the cover of Elle. No male in their right mind had refused her favors and she said, "You're making a big mistake."
"It won't be the first or the biggest." I weaved out of the club into a flurry of errant snowflakes. My feet trudged across Place de La Concorde to the Seine. The river lay between the two banks like octopus ink and I lifted my leg onto the parapet.
Rue St. Honore. I ran off the bridge, as the fat flic yelled, "Arrete, arrete."
I easily outran the portly gendarme into a thick snow softening the night. Cars glided noiselessly on the streets, as I marched relentlessly to the 15th arrondisement, realizing while I might not forget this trespass, I could forgive Candia's sin. I just needed the chance.
Reaching the Impasse Dantzig I lifted my eyes. The lights in the atelier were off. My key turned in the lock. The door opened with a creak. An empty champagne bottle was on the floor between shiny Gucci loafers. They were neither my size nor style. A man moaned behind the nearest closed door and I charged into the bedroom with a roar. A balding man lifted his arms too late to deflect my fist and he tumbled semi-conscious onto the floor. I threw Candia on the floor. The girl nursing my cold, the lover cuddling me after sex, and the dinner companion laughing at my jokes were gone
"Why?"
"You know why," she spat with an unrecognizable hostility. “You never loved me. You loved a ghost. Your cousin told me about this 'Lisa' and she never loved you. No one will ever love you.”
I envisioned a deadly blow, police, and trial. No French court had convicted a man of a crime de passion, but my blow would have been revenge for her speaking the truth. I chucked the Mickey Mouse telephone through the window into the street, after which I scourged the couple from the apartment with the frayed wire. The man's suit and shoes followed it out the broken window as a petty act of vengeance.
I packed my clothes, journals, tape deck, camera, and photos. Five minutes later I fled the apartment fearing the arrival of the gendarmes, and hailed a taxi on the nearest boulevard. The hour and my bag explained the story and the unshaven driver shrugged knowingly, "Un hotel?"
"Ouais, le Hotel Marais." My accelerated breathing worried the driver, who asked, "Mssr., vous etes okay?"
"Ouais.
I lowered the window. The cold air failed to pluck the splintered razors from my heart. A bottle of tranquilizers rested in my coat. Three or four were on the menu. It took the driver 20 minutes to reach Rue Des Ecouffes. I paid with a 100-franc note.
"Keep the change." The sky was cloaked by glowering gray clouds. The day held no promise of a dawn.
"Merci." He drove away to pick up a couple holding hands.
I entered the hotel lobby with my hand gripping the bottle of tranks. The old woman was asleep at the desk. Waking her seemed a sin, except I had nearly broken the 5th Commandment twenty minutes before. I rang the bell and she blinked several times before recognizing my face from the previous stay.
"Ah, Mssr., je imagine que vous voulez une chambre."
"Une chambre pour un nuit." A room with a bath fulfilled my physical needs.
"Chambre 312." She passed over a brass key and indicated the stairs.
It was the same room from my previous stay. Nothing had changed. I sat on the soft bed and weighed my options. The pill bottle was only one route. The window was another. Neither would save my soul and I dropped three pills. The rest would have to wait for a more desperate occasion.
I woke to the shouts of the little gangsters on Rue des Ecouffes. The bells from a nearby church toned out the noon hour. The throbbing of my hangover was replaced by the resurrection of Candia's infidelity. She had brought her lover on purpose. Jack Lemmon must have felt the same way in THE APARTMENT when he realized Shirley MacLaine was having an affair with his boss, Fred MacMurray.
My hands mimicked the act of strangulation. I choked her ghost dead. Thin air was no replacement for a seventeen year-old's neck, except I was only a murderer in my most grievous thoughts and Candia's wrongs were forgiveable to a lost man, but I tore up the photos of Candia naked in the changing cabinets of the Piscine Deligny, singing in Clermont-Fernand, and visiting her grandmother in Vichy. The shreds built a pyre in the hotel ashtray and burned with a chemical speed. The flames wrinkled her face and an acrid fume corkscrewed into my nose. Fearing Candia might invade my body, I flushed the flaming photos down the toilet, then left the hotel for a drink.
The icy wind hurried me to the Tartine on Rue Du Rivoli and I sat on the terrace sheltered by a glass wall. The waitress wrote down my order of a cafe au lait, croissant, and two shots of Calvados before disappearing inside.
Waiting for my breakfast I viewed passing couples with hatred. Two more Calvados numbed my senses to the grisly weather and diminished the bite of Candia's words, Vanessa's coldness, and Lisa's disappearance. After a fifth applejack I failed to register someone sitting beside me, until he lit a cigarette.
"I've been looking for you." Bernard's stubble indicated taht he had not woken at his apartment.
"Why?" My face was numb from the alcohol.
"I called your house this morning and spoke with your girlfriend." Bernard signaled to the waiter for another round.
"More like my girlfiend." The change from dropping an 'r' from friend was lost on the Frenchman. "What she say for herself?"
"She is worried about you.” Bernard's eyes pursued two schoolgirls.
"If she cared about me, why she bring home that man?" I blew into my hands.
You Americans treat women as men. They are women and we have to protect the double standard, otherwise the battle between man and woman will be lost." Bernard waved to a model heading to a casting call. "You allowed her to have affairs and she concluded you did not care about her. She said you were still in love with another love. Some blonde."
I had told Candia the story once. I hadn't thought about Lisa since then. At least I didn't think that I had thought about her.
"I struck that man."
"He deserved The French like stories of hot blood. "Excellent, and now she respects you."
"Respects me?"
"Yes, a woman is like a horse. You hold the reins tight and the horse will throw you. Too loose and she will run away." He slapped his hands together. "Yeehaw."
"You've been watching too many cowboy movies. I wasn't raised to ht a woman. A man without a problem. Especially if he is in my bed." Not striking a woman was my parents' one rule that I obeyed without question. I was sadly learning that there should have been more.
"The caveman drags a woman by the hair to the cave." Bernard inhaled deeply on his cigarette. "They have a little corps-a-corps. She stays with him. Not the man who lets her ugh-ugh with another caveman."
"There are no drawings of Neanderthals dong that, only TV cartoons, however man's dominance over woman needs no historical proof in France. Women are not horse. This is the almost the 21st Century."
"Eh, alors, the collapse of classic family structures reinforces the need to establish a rapport de force," Bernard stubbed out his cigarette. "Yell at her, hit her, and make love. She expects you to act like a man, not a Mickey Mouse."
"Couldn't I be another Disney character? I really like Pluto."
"No, you are not a dog, you are not an ape. You are a man." My passivity ignited his machismo for my own good. "I saw you throw Brigitte Bardot out of a nightclub. Your friend Danny talked about your fights with the Russian mafia. Are you going to let a teenager push you around?"
"Sometimes you have to know when to do nothing."
"If you let this wound bleed, you will be no good for the next woman you meet."
"I'm done with women."
"Ha, there is always another woman. Even for you. A plus tard."
To prove his thesis Bernard stalked a fashionably-attired woman in her thirties. Within a few paces she rewarded his boldness with a smile and they linked arms.
Bernard was right. I had sung I'M A MAN a hundred times.
Restrengthened by the Yardbirds song, I shambled to the boulevard, foreseeing my kicking in the door, except every taxi was occupied and the urge to reclaim Candia was humbled by the icy drizzle.
I called Brigitte. She came across the bridge for lunch. Angus was happy to see me.
"I knew this would happen."
"I knew you would say that."
"Philippe said she was too young to be faithful." This was hard to take coming from an adulteress, but my problem with Candia had nothing to do with her infidelity.
"I was faithful."
"Only in body. That blonde in New York has a lock on your heart. She hasn't thought about you in years. Fool." Brigitte offered my old place on the sofa. Sleeping with Angus might accelerate the healing process, however I opted to remain at the hotel.
The owner brought me tea and a baguette every morning. Candia came to the club and asked for a second chance. It was more like the fifth. We slept together three nights and I got a venereal disease. She said it came from a toilet seat. Our final good-bye was at the VD clinic.
I bought a typewriter and wrote a novella about a nightclub owner being offered fame and fortune by Satan. A French production company invested money in a script of GO-GO GIRLS FROM HELL. Bernard hired three models to cut a record TAKE ME HIGHER. The three models got pregnant from their boyfriends and blamed me for the miracle of Immaculate Conception. The hundred sample records of TAKE ME HIGHER arrived warped as potato chips and the film company lost interest without the girls.
Worse Vadim and Lisa showed up at le Reve.
"Surprised to see me here." I bought a bottle of champagne.
"No, everyone said you were here." Her eyes were distant.
"They said it was fun here." Vadim held her hand.
"Some nights it is." Usually the ones Bernard and I drank too much.
"You ever get back to New York?" Vadim ordered a better bottle of champagne.
"Only once. I was told it was a good idea to stay away. No one has told me different."
"I followed the same advice." Vadim's eyes followed the waitress to the bar.
"Vadim can't go back to the States." Lisa ignored his surveillance. Her beauty was still breathtaking, but that gift was endangered at age thirty by the passage of youth.
"But we are welcome in Russia.” Vadim toasted me with a nearly empty glass.
"Back in the USSR."
"You should come out there. Moscow is wild like New York." Vadim glowed with pride. "Another few years and communism is dead."
"Yeah, you two were made for Russia." Lisa's disdain extended to both of us and I wondered how Vadim had survived the last four years with her.
"I like any place fun."
Bernard joined our table. We drank more champagne. Lisa kept saying she wanted to leave. Vadim wasn't in the mood to sit in a hotel. Bernard and he became friends that week. Lisa never came to the bar again.
Bernard accepted Vadim's invitation to vacation over the holidays in Ibiza. He wanted me to come too, but instead I bought a one-way ticket to America from a travel agency on the Boulevard St. Paul.
A taxi got me to Charles de Gaulle Aeroport with an hour to spare. I dumped my spare change into the charity bowl for children. There were no good-byes.
My parents didn't question my unannounced return and I celebrated a family Christmas with all the trimmings. My brothers and sisters sensed my smiles were superficial and asked me to stay, except Boston was too small after Paris and New York.
The Amtrak train took 5 hours to reach Penn Station. A taxi drove me to East 10th street. My apartment seemed tiny after living in Candia's atelier, but the pizza at Stromboli's was good and TV was in English. My friends initially greeted me with suspicion, since any absence from the city was regarded an act of treason to New Yorkers.
No one mentioned the Continental, Viktor Malenski, or Lisa, for Manhattan moves too fast to allow scandals to take permanent root. My mail from the past year held nothing from the NYPD and the phone messages complied by the subleasee were from friends and not Internal Affairs.
At the end of January I instructed Bernard to sell my share of the club. He warned this was an imprudent business move. I needed the cash. The money arrived the end of January.
An albino producer hired me to write a screenplay. We spent the winter in the Berkshire Hills, fleshing out a tale about a young mistress inheriting an offshore island in the Keys. He had me sign over the rights to WHERE THE HIGHWAY ENDS for $10,000 and a 1964 Triumph Tiger. The movie was made it to film.
"You should come out to LA," Sherri said XXX companies were paying good money for porno scripts.
"You said that before."
"And you said 'no'."
"Give me a good reason to come out."
"Maybe you can meet a nice girl."
“In the porno industry?"
"Well, maybe not nice, but sexy." She never lied to me, except about herself.
"I'll come out there."
I flew out to the valley and wrote several screenplays, however the industry was switching from film to video for the fast-forward action crowd and starlets would rather fuck a car valet than a writer. North Hollywood was hell for writers.
Without Che's star quality my cousin's films had degenerated to sloppy free-for-alls. Her name dropped from star to supporting roles and Sherri's condition worsened with an arrest for indecent exposure. After I bailed her out, she drove her battered Skylark directly to the dealer in Sunland.
"Maybe you should cool out. We could go to the desert."
"So you can fuck me for free like everyone else?" This was the drugs speaking.
"No, so you don't die." Her arms and legs were stitched with tracks. She was nodding behind the wheel and we narrowly missed a semi-trailer on the Ventura Freeway.
"Let me drive."
"No."
"You're going to kill us." I was desperate, but not that desperate.
“I survived being abandoned by my mother. I survived adoption. I survived these films. I survived Che leaving me." She cried for an hour by the side of the road. I held her in my arms. Worst was sure to come.
"You can't die on me. You promised you would push me down the stairs when I need to die."
"I’ll live that long." Sherri sniffed away the tears. "Even if it kills me."
Several days later Sherri dropped me at LAX and I wondered whether I would see her again. Our friends and enemies died from AIDS, ODs, suicides, and stupid accidents. Natural causes were for the rest of the world and so were normal relationships.
New York women were looking for millionaires. I didn’t stand a chance against bald-headed bankers or loud stockbrokers. On a visit to Boston my mother suggested visiting Ireland to find a woman like herself or my sisters.
"I’ll even pay the ticket. I know you want to marry and have kids."
"I do." It was the first time I admitted this goal.
"You'll never meet a girl like that in New York."
"Other people do. Maybe I'll be lucky."
"Lucky is for horse races." She believed more in prayers than casinos. "What about Ireland?"
“I’ll save it for a rainy day.” Every Irish woman left the Emerald Isle once she's old enough to breed or else she'll have a brood of five by age 20. I would go when the time was right and that time was not now.
From 2004 to her retirement from the Adult Video Industry in 2015 Amber Rayne ran wild as a goddess of lust over the screen of TVs and computers. Her performances covered every genre from lesbianism, no holds barred, and her heart's delight, bondage. Sadly Amber passed from this Earth in 2016.
A victim of a cocaine drug overdose.
This tragedy dumbfounded old school hedonists.
31 and gone.
But she lives on the internet.
Until Hell freezes over, because bad girls don't go to heaven.
Two seconds after the woman hung up, Sean Tempo dialed 911.
"Yes, may I help you?” the 911 operator answered within ten seconds.
Sean explained the nature of the emergency and gave the operator the woman's address. Several seconds passed in silence before the operator stated, "EMS no longer responds to that address."
"What do you mean? No longer responds?"
>"EMS has logged seven suicide attempts, four domestic violence calls, and four reports of attempted break-ins from that address in the last year. Always from the same caller. Che Chasta."
The name strummed a chord in Sean's memory.
"Which means?"
"No one will answer that call. Not the EMS, the Fire Department, or the police. Sorry."
"So what am I supposed to do?"
"Go over yourself,” the operator suggested and signed off saying, "Have a nice day."
If the State of California was abdicating its social responsibility, then he would answer this woman's plea, if only to take her to a hospital. Sean star-69ed the caller's number. The phone was busy, and he reckoned the caller had dropped it on the floor. He searched the Yellow Pages for a taxi service. A dispatcher informed him that a cab would arrive in less than five minutes and the ride over to Hollywood at this time of the afternoon would take no more than twenty-five minutes.
Sean hung up and stuck the sheets from the bed in the dryer, then plucked a real $100 bill in his pocket. He snatched a set of house keys off the kitchen counter and left the apartment. The door shut behind him. Maybe he should have left a note for the women, but every second counted in matters of life and death.
The corridor led to the elevators. The walls were unpainted sheet rock and the hallway smelled of damp concrete. Most of the doors to the other apartments had no knobs or locks. Light bulbs hung by a wire from the ceiling by a wire.
Whoever had financed this repair project had run out of money, but at least the elevator was working and Sean stepped inside the car.
When the doors opened on the ground floor, Sean ran through the dusty atrium to the waiting taxi.
He gave the driver the destination and the Sikh driver pulled out of the parking lot.
Rain bounced off the pavement of a broad boulevard lined with body, brake, and transmission shops. The lights ran in sequence to the Hollywood Freeway. Sean could barely see out the windows and cracked open the window. The driver chattered in Punjabi over the radio, as the taxi swerved through traffic. The cab narrowly missed sideswiping several trucks, although none of these close calls fazed the driver. At Highland he sliced across four lanes to the exit and slipped past the single queue of vehicles to stop abruptly at a yellow light.
Sorry, sir, there are too many policemen to burn the light." "No worries."
The driver waited out the oncoming traffic, then swerved right onto the boulevard, maintaining the speed limit until turning onto a street of sad bungalows. The taxi halted before a dull green house with an overgrown lawn. The rain had let up, but the air was thick with a cold damp.
"Just wait a few minutes." Sean opened the taxi door.
"No problem, if you give me something to hold."
"You mean like money?"
"Exactly, sir."
Sean was a little hesitant about handing the Sikh a hundred, but this woman might need a ride to the hospital, so he noted the driver's permit number and said. "I'll be right out."
"And I shall be waiting, sir." The driver held up the bill.
Sean got out of the taxi.
Several stray cats sulked through the lawn's high weeds, ignoring a crow pecking at a crumbled piece of trash. The only sound was a dog barking in he distance. People lived in these houses, but no one was walking around in this weather.
Overhead dark clouds were preparing for another downpour and a wet wind rustled through the bushes.
Sean tried the front door. It was locked. On a hunch he lifted the doormat and found a rusty key. It turned the lock.
The scent of musty mildew welcomed him into the living room. An old RCA TV was surrounded by stacks of videos and the furniture was buried under soiled clothing. The fireplace was filled with take-out containers and garbage overflowed from two trash cans. Whoever had called him earlier certainly didn't hold with cleanliness being close to godliness and he heard a phone off the hook.
"Anyone here?”
No one answered him and he studied the life-sized posters publicizing the various adult videos. They featured a big-breasted blonde surrounded by muscular men. The photo told the storyline of the movie in one word.
Gangbang.
Many men with one woman.
Sean connected the face and body with the name Che Chasta.
Six years ago he had seen her dance at the Triple Threat Theater in Times Square for ten men at the afternoon show. This had to be her place.
He pushed open the last door. The busy signal was coming from inside. The bedroom was surprisingly tidy in comparison to the rest of the house.
A video camera was pointed at the blonde woman on the bed. She was naked other than the cuffs restraining her to the bedposts. Che Chasta was in the proper position to perform her cinematic specialty, except Sean wasn't sure she was breathing. After shutting off the video camera and hanging up the phone, he touched her neck. His fingertips felt a pulse under the deathly cold skin. He tapped her face.
"Wake up."
The blonde opened her eyes and croaked, "Who are you."
"Me?" Sean stared at how her unnaturally firm breasts were stretched to a translucent thinness.
"Yes, where did you come from?" Her eyes wandered in and out of focus. A needle mark reddened the inside of her elbow. Someone else had shot her up and tied her to the bed. The video was for fetishists into sleeping women. There was an audience for every genre in porno.
"From Sherri's." He resisted touching her breasts, but undid the cuff from her wrist and then loosened the restraints on her ankles. "I came, because you sounded like you were in trouble."
"I still am.” The blonde lazily rubbed her wrists, as her eyes drifted up inside her skull. The taxi blew its horn outside.
"Who's that?"
"The taxi." The smell of woman roiling in his nostrils. His arousal felt like a betrayal of Sherri and he stepped back toward the door. Sean was not the type of man to take advantage of a woman in this condition.
Even of a porno star.
"Where you going?"
"I was going to take you to the hospital."
"No hospital." An expression of recognition passed over her face. "I know you."
"How?"
"You're the man from the highway."
"I am?"
"Yes, the man from nowhere."
"It seems to be my new name."
Che had fit in another piece in his puzzle.
He saw himself asleep in the back of a car with Lena and Che in the front seat. His mind played a dirty movie. Looking down at Che he started another. The horn blew outside. "I got to pay the driver. I'll be right back."
Sean threw a blanket over the blonde and ran to the street. The driver gave him the change and Sean handed him a $10 tip. He returned to the house and locked the door. When he entered the bedroom, the blonde said dreamily, "Funny, you showing up again."
"Why?" Sean sat on the edge of the bed.
"Just we help you that night and now you help me." The blonde actress touched his face, as if she were a blind person trying to read his features.
"So I guess we're even, but who did this to you?"
The blonde licked her parched lips.
"I'd love to tell you everything, but I need a glass of water first."
"Sure thing." Sean went into the kitchen. finding a clean glass was impossible. He washed a tea cup in the sink. When he got back to the bedroom, Che Chasta was crashed out in a distorted parody of Sleeping Beauty.
Sean rechecked her pulse.
It was stronger, but she didn't react to his touch and he surrendered to the temptation of caressing her breasts. They were as hard as they looked. His other hand fingered her soft hair. She was completely at his mercy, yet however easy as it was to think about doing it, which in many women's minds that was just as punishable as rape, he was incapable of executing the actual deed.
Sean pulled the covers over her body and unplugged the telephone, since Che needed sleep a lot more than any contact with the outside world.
Sean entered the living room and cleared off the sofa room. His body was shaking with frustration. He hadn't been with a woman in six months and nothing in the last two days suggested that this stretch of celibacy would end in the near future.
The only women he had met in Los Angeles were two lesbian lovers and a drugged sex star.
Both scenarios were promising in his fantasies, but not in reality.
He sank onto the couch and noticed the hundreds of videos scattered around the TV.
They were all X-rated.
Che was in every one.
Sean flashed Che Chasta watching these videos as Gloria Swanson had viewed her old black-and-white films in SUNSET BOULEVARD. He fought off the disturbing image, since he cast himself as William Holden, and picked out a box titled NEW PUSSY ON THE TOWN. The video dated back to the early 80s. The starlet wore her darker hair in a Farah Fawcett shag and her body mirrored the nubility of a teenager out for her first wild fling.
Sean decided to reward himself for saving her life by setting in motion a one-man Che Chasta Film Festival. He armed himself with a remote control and pressed the PLAY button for YOUNG AND BAD, which captured Che right off the pumpkin truck. None of the bearded studs were memorable, while Che demonstrated a star quality ready to blaze nova.
He fast-forwarded through the inane dialogues and the repetitive sex scenes. Hundreds of males spurted semen onto her breasts, backside, thighs, face, belly, yet never inside, for long ago someone in the porno business had decided that the money shot was more visually dramatic than the man just groaning in pleasure.
Psychologically this institutional coitus interruptus also helped the masturbating viewer regard his own onanistic orgasm as the greatest sensation a man could experience. None of it was the truth.
Somewhere in the middle of the retrospective Che Chasta's body artificially morphed the physical ideal the worshipped by brainwashed American males, though this corporeal modification thrust her into a maelstrom of more and more men and women.
Pornography was supposed to be sexy or maybe even erotic, yet Sean was unaroused, until selecting A THING CALLED LUST whose cover portrayed Che and Sherri embracing a nude statue.
They were both ten years younger and their eyes glowed with scorn for damnation. He slipped this video into the VCR and returned to the sofa, pressing the remote control's PLAY button.
The film's quality was low-grade, the dialogue worst, the lighting muddy, however the sex scenes between Che and Sherri was like watching two cougars fighting over the same kill and for the first time this evening Sean wished a time machine would transport him back in time to the two women on the TV screen.
Thwarted by temporal physics, Sean did the next best thing and undid his jeans. Part of him became Che, while his stroking hand mimicked Sherri's vagina and tightened. A lava flow surged from him with a shudder, though within seconds the fire died out and the dream was over. He was just watching a TV and zipped up his trousers, feeling emptier than ever, for there was something about the act that no longer fulfilled him. He was tired of being alone, but that was not going to change tonight or any time in the foreseeable future.
Worse was that he would have no warning, when it all went to shit, but then that fate went with his territory.
It went with the territory.
